Artist Portfolio Magazine’s 10 Art Competition

Matteo Lollini – Bologna, Italy

Managing social media for a living, web surfing for passion, I love communication, images, texts and their interaction.
Painting for me is a way to explore ideas and understand things happening around me.
In terms of aesthetics, I’m interested in the philosophy of error: “visual stumbles”, glitches (new media bugs, visually speaking), absurdity, polisemy. Consequently my works are substantially figurative: they need to be anchored to reality to make it switch to something else. I love the tension between figurative context and over-geometrical composition: this conflict creates some sort of focal places, between 3 and 2D, where sometimes the key to interpretation lies.
Speaking of techniques, I usually use traditional tools such as acrilic and oil painting, on canvas or wood panel, MDF or chipboard supports, of various sizes.

Presented works:
1) “Minus Three”
Oil on pine panel, w 44 cm / h 105 (3 elements, w 38 cm / h 35 cm each), year: 2018
Portrait of a woman, multi stripe wallpaper in the background. 
Althought the body of the woman stands “aligned”, the stripes behind don’t match. The surrealistic effect pivots on the support: the module on the top has slid to the left taking the wallpapaer with it (the white background around the image is not part of the work).
Three is the number of the “waste” stripes.

2) “Instagram Flowers” _ series (3 subjects)
Oil on canvas, w 30 x h 40 cm each
, year: 2018
The idea is to translate the social media’s hypebolic way to portray – redundant, highly colored and symbolic – on canvas.